Michel Hajji Georgiou

The Iranian party, Hezbollah, has never been a territorial resistance. It has been a militia of spatial expansion, using territory as an argument for legitimacy. It is time to acknowledge this, once and for all. Since its inception, Hezbollah has lived with a fundamental division: it is simultaneously the armed wing of an imperial project—that of the Iranian Wilayat al-Faqih as defined by Imam Khomeini—and an actor that claims to embody the “resistance” to liberate a national territory. “Space” first: that of the Shiite ummah, from Qom to Beirut, structured around a Supreme Leader whose decisions, in matters of war and peace, are binding. Then there is the “territory”: that of South Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and the disputed borders, where the party presents itself as a bulwark against Israel and the guardian of a national cause. This dichotomy is not new. Upon its establishment in 1984, under the guise of “resistance to the Israeli occupation,” Hezbollah began by eliminating a significant portion of the national resistance movement stemming from the Lebanese left—Mahdi Amel and his associates. It established itself on the margins: the Bekaa Valley, South Lebanon, and the southern suburbs of Beirut. There, it built a sprawling social infrastructure financed by Iran, and later supported by Assad’s Syria within the framework of the “alliance of minorities.”

Twenty years ago, Gebran Tueini was literally pulverized in a car-bomb attack. His assassins from the Damascus–Tehran axis, together with their Lebanese accomplices, had placed him on the blacklist of “dangerous personalities” to be eliminated at all costs, insofar as the latter had managed, within a few years, to reconstitute a distinctly Lebanese idea of a plural and coherent front, one that guaranteed sovereignty and freedom. A compact front, capable of transcending the divisions inherited from the civil war and the sectarian compartmentalizations on which the axis had waltzed for decades in order to divide the Lebanese more effectively, and thereby establish itself as the authority responsible for settling the very conflicts it had itself created, according to the classic logic of the arsonist-firefighter.

Passing away on December 9, 2019, Môrice Awwad remains an exception in the Lebanese cultural and literary landscape. This is the portrait of a rebellious man — shortlisted in 2015 for the Nobel Prize in Literature — and of his visceral relationship with the mother tongue, the vernacular, Lebanese, which he turned into his banner, his matrix-territory, and his reason for being. Môrice Awwad was born in 1934 into a Greater Lebanon still at its first hesitant steps, yet already traversed by the tension of everything to come: independence, the golden age, then violence and the return to servitude. But it is not his birth that matters so much as the birth of language inside him. One must imagine that Awwad was immersed — almost literally — in a Lebanese linguistic placenta, strange as the image may be, in the entrails of his mother. “I remember hearing my mother cry when I was still inside her,” he would later write. From childhood on, in the house in Bsalim, a bond forms — and it will never come undone: the language of his mother — spoken Lebanese — becomes his first home. The only one that will never crack.

Holy Father, at the moment when you are about to set foot on the soil of Lebanon and Turkey, on the threshold of this wounded Levant that was once one of the cradles of believing humanity, we dare to write to you. The aim is not to add one more voice to the concert of protocol speeches. That would be of absolutely no interest. Empty formulas, glittering but soulless, you will hear in abundance during your visit. This letter asks of you something at once simple and vertiginous: to take up the torch. The torch of Francis. That of an integral humanism which strove, against all odds, to grasp the Gospel in its most naked form: the dignity of every human being, fraternity as the only possible horizon of politics, religion freed from identitarian idols.

One year to the day, Bashar al-Assad collapsed, dragging down with him half a century of dynastic tyranny, disguised as modernist “secularism” and as a bulwark against chaos. Good riddance. Good riddance to a regime that turned Syrians into the raw material of an industry of terror, in the name of a pseudo-Arabism grafted onto the so-called “alliance of minorities,” alternately handed over to Iran and Russia, and, ultimately, so convenient for Israel. Good riddance to a power that transformed the Alawite community into both a human shield and a commercial asset, and that survived only by incarcerating “God Himself” in the underground hell of Saydnaya. Good riddance, too, to the comforting fiction according to which barbarism was the price to pay to avoid something far worse: chaos, Islamism, a war of all against all. Syria paid the highest price to prove that the worst option was him.

No — the war unleashed by Russia against Ukraine cannot be dismissed as a peripheral disturbance or reduced to a mere dispute over territory, whatever the assorted Putinists would have us believe. The Russian aggression exposes a deeper fracture: a clash between two visions of the world. On one side, freedom and the rule of law; on the other, the nostalgia for an imperial order, resurrected under the guise of a mythologized “golden age,” built upon domination and terror. What unfolds today upon Ukrainian soil is nothing less than the deliberate attempt to resurrect the imperial logic of Russia and to impose it as the political paradigm of this century. The battle for the Donbas is not a local skirmish. It is a test for the whole of Europe — for its courage, its memory, and its very future. Nothing less. The regime of Vladimir Putin does not merely seek to annex land. Putin aims to restore an imperial architecture with explicit historical referents: Peter the Great, Catherine II, and the idea of a “civilizational space” sanctified by the myth of the “Russian world,” wherein peoples are not political subjects but ethnic matter to be absorbed, reshaped, or erased.

Is it true that a filmmaker essentially explores a single theme—or a single universe—through the whole of their work, in the sense that everything ultimately forms a coherent whole, as Jean-Luc Godard suggested? Guillermo del Toro seems to fit this theory perfectly. The Mexican director, who has just delivered (on Netflix) his own version of one of cinema's most exploited figures—Mary Shelley's Frankenstein —appears driven by a foundational, almost obsessive, even prophetic intuition that is indeed detectable throughout his entire body of work and gives him a rare coherence. For del Toro, the monster is never the monster. Deformed otherness, scarred flesh, unnatural anatomy are never synonymous with actual monstrosity in his work. Quite the opposite: in the Mexican director's vision, the monster is the most human figure of all—one bearing the weight of suffering, loneliness, rejection, humiliation, but also love. Admittedly, he is far from the first to venture onto this terrain. But in an increasingly dehumanized world, his project rings with an even more striking truth.